development

About a decade ago, Frances Jensen’s sweet-natured 15-year-old son returned home from a friend’s house with his hair dyed black and announced he was planning to add red streaks. Jensen’s reaction was typical of countless parents who suddenly confront a stranger living in their house. “I was gobsmacked. Is this really my child?” she writes. While many of us would just start ranting, Jensen, then a Harvard Medical School neurology professor and researcher, was inspired by the incident to start …

Imagine that you’ve lived in the same neighborhood for most of your life. Your friends, your family, your personal history are all rooted there. Sure, the neighborhood isn’t as desirable as it once was. It’s fallen on hard times, and there’s a lot of crime. But it’s home. Then the town decides that your neighborhood is a dump. It wants to make the working-class area more upscale by “revitalizing” it, but that means displacing you and your neighbors, most of …